Part 4

Although the chickadee is small and delicate-looking, he seems not to mind the very coldest of weather. Give him enough to eat, and the wind may whistle. He picks his food, tiny insects, insects’ eggs, and the like, out of crevices in the bark of trees and about the ends of twigs, and so is seldom or never without resources. The deepest snows do not cover up his dinner-table. His worst days, no doubt, are those in which everything is covered with sleet.

One of his prettiest traits is his skill in hanging back downward from the tip of a swinging branch or from the under side of a leaf while in search of provender. As a small boy, who had probably been to the circus, once said, the chickadee is a “first-rate performer on the flying trapeze.”

III

THE BROWN CREEPER

In the midst of a Massachusetts winter, when a man with his eyes open may walk five miles over favorable country roads and see only ten or twelve kinds of birds, the brown creeper’s faint zeep is a truly welcome sound. He is a very little fellow, very modestly dressed, without a bright feather on him, his lower parts being white and his upper parts a mottling of brown and white, such as a tailor might call a “pepper and salt mixture.”

The creeper’s life seems as quiet as his colors. You will find him by overhearing his note somewhere on one side of you as you pass. Now watch him. He is traveling rather quickly, with an alert, business-like air, up the trunk of a tree in a spiral course, hitching along inch by inch, hugging the bark, and every little while stopping to probe a crevice of it with his long, curved, sharply pointed bill. He is in search of food,--insects’ eggs, grubs, and what not; morsels so tiny that it need not surprise us to see him spending the whole day in satisfying his hunger.

There is one thing to be said for such a life: the bird is never without something to take up his mind. In fact, if he enjoys the pleasures of the table half as well as some human beings seem to do, his life ought to be one of the happiest imaginable.

How flat and thin he looks, and how perfectly his colors blend with the grays and browns of the mossy bark! No wonder it is easy for us to pass near him without knowing it. We understand now what learned people mean when they talk about the “protective coloration” of animals. A hawk flying overhead, on the lookout for game, must have hard work to see this bit of a bird clinging so closely to the bark as to be almost a part of it.

And if a hawk does pass, you may be pretty sure the creeper will see him, and will flatten himself still more tightly against the tree and stay as motionless as the bark itself. He needs neither to fight nor to run away. His strength, as the prophet said, is to sit still.

But look! As the creeper comes to the upper part of the tree, where the bark is less furrowed than it is below, and therefore less likely to conceal the scraps of provender that he is in search of, he suddenly lets go his hold and flies down to the foot of another tree, and begins again to creep upward. If you keep track of him, you will see him do this hour after hour. He never walks down. Up, up, he goes, and if you look sharply enough, you will see that whenever he pauses he makes use of his sharp, stiff tail-feathers as a rest--a kind of camp-stool, as it were, or, better still, a bracket. He is built for his work; color, bill, feet, tail-feathers--all were made on purpose for him.

He is a native of the northern country, and therefore to most readers of this book he is a winter bird only. If you know his voice, you will hear him twenty times for once that you see him. If you know neither him nor his voice, it will be worth your while to make his acquaintance.

When you come upon a little bunch of chickadees flitting through the woods, listen for a quick, lisping note that is something like theirs, but different. It may be the creeper’s, for although he seems an unsocial fellow, seldom flocking with birds of his own kind, he is fond of the chickadee’s cheerful companionship.

1. Male. 2. Female]

To see him and hear his zeep, you would never take him for a songster; but there is no telling by the looks of a bird how well he can sing. In fact, plainly dressed birds are, as a rule, the best musicians. The very handsome ones have no need to charm with the voice. And our modest little creeper has a song, and a fairly good one; one that answers his purpose, at all events, although it may never make him famous. In springtime it may be heard now and then even in a place like Boston Common; but of course you must go where the birds pair and nest if you would hear them at their finest; for birds, like other people, sing best when they feel happiest.

The brown creeper’s nest used to be something of a mystery. It was sought for in woodpeckers’ holes. Now it is known that as a general thing it is built behind a scale of loose bark on a dead tree, between the bark and the trunk. Ordinarily, if not always, it will be found under a flake that is loose at the bottom instead of at the top. Into such a place the female bird packs tightly a mass of twigs and strips of the soft inner bark of trees, and on the top of this prepares her nest and lays her eggs. Her mate flits to and fro, keeping her company, and once in a while cheering her with a song, but so far as has yet been discovered he takes no hand in the work itself. It is quite possible that the female, who is to occupy the nest, prefers to have her own way in the construction of it.

After the young ones are hatched, at all events, the father bird’s behavior leaves nothing to be complained of. He “comes to time,” as we say, in the most loyal manner. In and out of the nest he and the mother go, feeding their hungry charges, making their entry and exit always at the same point, through the merest crack of a door, between the overhanging bark and the tree, just above the nest. It is a very pretty bit of family life.

It would be hard to imagine a nest better concealed from a bird’s natural enemies, especially when, as is often the case, the tree stands in water on the edge of a stream or lake. And not only is the nest wonderfully well hidden, but it is perfectly sheltered from rain, as it would not be if it were built under a strip of bark that was peeled from above. All in all, we must respect the simple, demure-looking creeper as a very clever architect.

THE BROWN THRASHER

The brown thrasher--called also the brown thrush--is a bird considerably longer than a robin, with a noticeably long tail and a long, curved bill. His upper parts are reddish brown or cinnamon color, and his lower parts white or whitish, boldly streaked with black. You will find him in hedgerows, in scrub-lands, and about the edges of woods, where he keeps mostly on or near the ground. His general manner is that of a creature who wishes nothing else so much as to escape notice. “Only let me alone,” he seems to say. If he sees you coming, as he pretty certainly will, he dodges into the nearest thicket or barberry-bush, and waits for you to pass.

Farmers know him as the “planting-bird.” In New England he makes his appearance with commendable punctuality between the twentieth of April and the first of May; and while the farmer is planting his garden, the thrasher encourages him with song. One man, who was planting beans, imagined that the bird said, “Drop it, drop it! Cover it up, cover it up!” Perhaps he did. It was good advice, anyhow.

In his own way the thrasher is one of the great singers of the world. He is own cousin to the famous mockingbird, and at the South, where he and the mocker may be heard singing side by side,--and so much alike that it is hard to tell one from the other,--he is known as the “brown mockingbird.” He would deserve the title but for one thing--he does not mock. In that respect he falls far short of his gray cousin, who not only has all the thrasher’s gift of original song, but a most amazing faculty of imitation, as every one knows who has heard even a caged mockingbird running over the medley of notes he has picked up here and there and carefully rehearsed and remembered. The thrasher’s song is a medley, but not a medley of imitations.

I have said that the thrasher keeps near the ground. Such is his habit; but there is one exception. When he sings he takes the very top of a tree, although usually it is not a tall one. There he stands by the half-hour together, head up and tail down, pouring out a flood of music; sounds of all sorts, high notes and low notes, smooth notes and rough notes, all jumbled together in the craziest fashion, as if the musician were really beside himself.

1, 2, 3. Males. 4. Female]

It is a performance worth buying a ticket for and going miles to hear; but it is to be heard without price on the outskirts of almost any village in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains and south of Maine. You must go out at the right time, however, for the bird sings but a few weeks in the year, although he remains in New England almost six months, or till the middle of October. He is one of the birds that every one should know, since it is perfectly easy to identify him; and once known, he is never to be forgotten, or to be confounded with anything else.

The thrasher’s nest is a rude, careless-looking structure, made of twigs, roots, and dry leaves, and is to be looked for on the ground, or in a bush not far above it. Often it has so much the appearance of a last year’s affair that one is tempted to pass it as unworthy of notice. I have been fooled in that way more than once.

The bird sits close, as the saying is, and as she stares at you with her yellow eyes, full at once of courage and fear, you will need a hard heart to disturb her. Sometimes she will really show fight, and she has been known to drive a small boy off the field. Her whistle after she has been frightened from her eggs or nestlings is one of the most pathetic sounds in nature. I should feel sorry for the boy who could hear it without pity.

Besides this mournful whistle, the thrasher has a note almost exactly like a smacking kiss,--very realistic,--and sometimes, especially at dusk, an uncanny, ghostly whisper, that seems meant expressly to suggest the presence of something unearthly and awful. So far as I am aware, there is no other bird-note like it. I have no doubt that many a superstitious person has taken to his heels on hearing it from the bushes along a lonesome roadside after nightfall.

Except in the spring, indeed, there is little about the thrasher’s appearance or behavior to suggest pleasant thoughts. To me, at any rate, he seems a creature of chronic low spirits. The world has used him badly, and he cannot get over it. He is almost the only bird I ever see without a little inspiration of cheerfulness. Perhaps I misjudge him.